Owned
by Bratanimus
Summary: You can’t own another person. But another person can own you. Set during Deathly Hallows. One shot RLNT.


_**A/N: Originally written for the Love Hearts Challenge on Live Journal's MetamorFic Moon. My Valentine's Day prompt was "You're Mine," which became a meditation on the concept of ownership.**_

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_You can't own another person. But another person can own you._

Someone once said that. Maybe it was James.

Those words rumble through my head like the thick blanket of clouds nudging itself along outside our window. The bedroom has a radiator that never turns off, so we lie in our underwear on top of the covers with our heads at the foot of the bed so we can feel the February chill through the slit of the open window. The air outside is cold, silent. It's almost electric with the threat of a snowstorm coming. The leafless trees reach upward into the silvery pre-dawn sky, looking like black claws cracking through a sheet of ice.

To my right, Tonks is lying on her stomach facing away from me with one hand tucked under my right buttock. She started doing that after I came back. After Dumbledore. She's terrified of waking up and finding me gone.

We're in Godric's Hollow in a rented cottage, a place that used to belong to distant relations of Kingsley. Harry is no longer a child, but he sleeps in the children's room, by himself, with every undetectable protection Tonks knows around him, the room, the house. She goes and checks on him at least eight times a night. I've managed to limit it to three. His jaw remains set, even in his sleep, his brow furrowed as if he's thinking hard. Perhaps he's pondering the future that belongs to him, the future to which he belongs. Maybe he's planning some other destiny entirely. It took two nights for us to sleep at all, thinking of the family that was slaughtered here. It's rather a macabre home base for the work Harry's doing, the work the Order is helping him do, taking it in turns. But perhaps it's appropriate. This isn't cheery business. Hasn't been for some time now.

Tonks stirs, and I realize she's not actually asleep after all. I don't have to see her eyes blinking as they stare out the window to know this. It's her breathing that tells me. The deep sighing.

I gingerly remove her hand from underneath me and roll onto my side, letting my fingers trace eddies up and down her spine, around her shoulder blades, up her neck and into her dark hair. It calms her. I watch as gooseflesh rises at my touch, and I smile. It's the first time I've smiled and meant it since yesterday morning, and I wonder if she knows, really knows, that she still affects me this way. I worry that she doesn't, that I haven't done enough, that having our assignments together hasn't been sufficient proof that I'm here for good –

"You awake?" she murmurs, interrupting my restless ruminating.

"Unless I've started tickling your back in my sleep, I would say so." I plant a slow kiss on her shoulder. My hand wraps possessively around her hip, squeezing the bone under the flesh. She's too thin, and there's nothing I can do about it.

"I've been thinking," she says. "Dreaming."

"Yes?" I say.

"When we get back, we should get married."

My heart contracts once, hard. I wait for her to turn around and face me, and she does. As she shifts, making the bedsprings squeak, my hand simply follows the movement of her body to settle on her other hip. These days, especially, it's hard for me to keep from touching her. A smile finds my face again and this time someone sees it, because it's for Tonks, and she's awake, and she wants to get married. She smiles back at me and I am reminded that she always gets her best ideas in the wee hours of the morning.

"I'm ready now," she tells me. Her eyes are puffy from lack of sleep, and there's a crease on her right cheek. I run my finger along it. I kiss it.

I'd gotten so used to her belonging to me. And then suddenly, after everything that happened, I had to cross such a distance, farther than her body. And, facing that distance, I realized how completely I belonged to her. And it was frightening. _Is_ frightening.

But with me, Tonks is a woman of few words, so when she says something I know she means it. I know better than to question her now. I reflect on how simply this has happened, this decision, and I wonder aloud how it did, after all the excuses, first from me, then – surprisingly – from her. She takes a breath and sighs, looking at her fingers resting on my waist.

"I was thinking about those clouds out there," she says quietly. "There's a storm coming. Maybe rain, maybe snow. It's cold enough."

I don't know what she means, so I just wait.

She goes on. "But the clouds are temporary. They bump up against the sky, into better weather. And better weather is coming. It always does."

With sleepy eyes, she leans into me and kisses my lips. I kiss her back, lingering there, and suddenly she belongs to me again. I feel her smiling into my mouth and it's the happiest I've felt in a very long time and it's scary and it's wonderful.

As we lie here, hand in hand, sleepless and waiting for the sun to come up so we'll have an excuse to get up and make the coffee, I realize finally that she's mine. And I'm hers. And it has nothing to do with possession. We are simply owned.


End file.
